David Aers

About

David Aers is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of English and Historical Theology at Duke University, with appointments in both the English Department and the Divinity School. His work on medieval and early modern literature, theology, and political culture spans disciplinary and temporal boundaries, with a focus on exploring the nuances and complexities of Christian tradition and its relationship to culture, politics, and ethics across the medieval and early modern periods. His recent publications include 'Versions of Election: From Langland and Aquinas to Calvin and Milton' (2020), which examines concepts of Predestination and Reprobation in Christian tradition from the Middle Ages through the Reformation, and a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on 'Imagining the Virtues' (2022), which considers the aftermaths of the Reformation on virtues and virtue ethics. Currently, he is working on a project titled 'Disappearing Jesus,' exploring how the Reformation transformed understandings of God and humanity in relation to medieval Christian teachings. Aers has published essays related to this project, including analyses of Calvinist versions of God and the impact of the Spirit on enemy love, and has presented on Milton’s hermeneutics and Christian violence. He is also the co-editor of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and serves as the Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Duke.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Theology
• Epistemology
• Art
• Pedagogy
• Physics
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• 6 Re-reading Troilus in Response to Tony Spearing

  Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2016-12-31 · 16 citations

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• Romanticism and Ideology

  2016-03-31 · 8 citations

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• Blake

  2016-03-31 · 3 citations

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  This chapter starts with Blake’s ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’, printed in 1793. Blake registers the fact that in such a society sexual energy is a threat to all ‘fixed’ boundaries and conventional order. Blake makes a connection between the wider structures of domination and the more intimate sphere of sexuality. In the world that Blake examines, sexual activity is itself absorbed into the nexus of social controls and containment. The chapter looks at Blake’s continuing development of th…

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• Imagining the Virtues: Medieval and Early Modern Histories

  Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies · 2022 · 2 citations

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  The tradition of the virtues was the model for moral practice from Aristotle to Luther. This tradition framed practices of living well in relation to visions of the good, and in its later Christian version, of God. One became good through practice, just as a harpist might play well through disciplined habits of exercise. In Alasdair MacIntyre's extraordinary excavations of philosophy and intellectual history, the Reformation is by and large neglected as he traces a path from Aristotle to Hume an…

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• ‘In Arthurus Day’: Community, Virtue, and Individual Identity in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

  Routledge eBooks · 2024 · 1 citations

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Frequent coauthors

• William Adler

  41 shared

• Elizabeth A. Clark

  Slippery Rock University

  41 shared

• Grant Wacker

  41 shared

• Hans J. Hillerbrand

  Duke University

  41 shared

• Richard P. Heitzenrater

  41 shared

• Laurie F. Maffly‐Kipp

  41 shared

• Christine Shepardson

  41 shared

• George E. Demacopoulos

  25 shared

Awards & honors

• James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of English

Similar researchers at Duke University

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• Priscilla Waldh-19
• Marianna Torgovnickh-14